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There’s More to Life Than This

I was thinking about the level progression in the game so far, and it struck me that it’s been sort of slowish. But I didn’t want to simply throw more fights at everyone and turn it into a straight up hack and slash. That’s just not the flavor we’ve been fermenting and it’s not anything I want to steer towards. I want this game to be about more than fighting constantly. So I thought I’d settle in and figure out some guidelines for non-combat XP rewards. This is what I came up with.

First, I figured out the XP needed to progress from one level to the next. Then I, pretty arbitrarily, picked the percentages of that I would want to come from combat, exploration, and quests. I figured, “there’s three so I may as well divide it up by three!” Seems legit, so that’s what I did. Then I took a look at what has been discovered so far to get the regular players to level three and decided that it’s very roughly ten new rooms discovered per character level.

So. Divide that 1/3 of each bit of XP needed to get to the next level by ten and you get a number of XP for every room discovered if you’re a certain character level. Figure that this level should be the mean average of the party to account for disparate PC levels and BAM! You get the following charts!

The quest XP will be a sort of wing it thing but based, as the description shows, on the CR charts as suggested in the DMG. Old schoolers will note that there is nothing on here about treasure as XP. That is deliberate, mostly because I simply don’t like the idea.

Note that the encounter specifically says “KEYED encounter”. That is because random encounters will not be worth anything! They are not to be farmed and are really there as a result of a failure on checks or taking too much time for something. Sometimes they will be worth their own XP as they could be a wonder, a new creature, or the start of a new quest.

I’ll be implementing this next session and it may need some tweaking. I’ll update the post if this is the case.